BACKGROUND (From Irrational Man - William Barrett, 1958)

(27) "By stripping away the wealth of images and symbols from medieval Christianity, Protestantism unveiled nature as a realm of objects hostile to the spirit and to be conquered by puritan zeal and industry." - "Depending action of nature, emptying it of all symbolic images humans saw there." Strip men naked."

(28) Modern man begins to look more and more like a giant skeleton (Giacometti sculpture, "Tall Walking Figure")

(31) "This capacity for living easily and familiarly at an extraordinary level of abstraction is the source of modern man's power. With it he has transformed the planet, annihilated space, and tripled the world's population. Negative side- desolating sense of rootlessness, vacuity (emptiness), lack of concrete feeling that hits modern man in moments of real anxiety.

(32) August, 1914 is a turning point in modern Western history and once past it we are directly confronted with the present day world. The sense of power with which modern man emerged-from the Middle Ages changed on that date into its opposite: a sense of weakness and dereliction before the whirlwind that man is able to unleash but not control."

(34) August, 1914 shattered the foundations of that human world (that existed prior to the war). It revealed that the apparent stability, security, and material process of society has rested, like everything human , upon the void. European man came face to face with himself as a stranger. When we ceased to be contained and sheltered within a stable social and political environment, he saw that his rational and enlightened philosophy could no longer console him with the assurance that it satisfactorily answered the question: "What is man?"

(35) Thus with the modern period of man...has enterd upon a secular phase of his history. He enterd it with exuberance over the prospect of increased power he would have over the world around him. But in his world, in which his dreams of power were often more than fulfilled, he found himslef for the first time homeless. Science stripped nature of its human forms and presented man with a universe that was neutral, alien, in its vastness and force, to his human purposes. Religion, before this phase set in, has been a structure that encompassed man's life, providing him with a system of images and symbols by which he could express his own aspirations to psychic wholeness. With the loss of this containing framework man became not only a dispossessed but fragmentary being.

WWII- Holocaust and God

"EXISTENTIALISM" (SARTRE) --

(616-17) Existence precedes essence - "We are what we make ourselves. Individual humans define human nature. We are what we make of ourselves. Individual humans are the creators of all values and whatever meaning there may be in human life. But they must act; they must exercise their choice. Only by so acting, in the face of preponderant force, evil, despair, and death, can individuals be truly free. And freedom for Sartre is the greatest good. It is not, however, merely a negative release. It is a dreadful responsibility, for individuals by their choices not only to determine their own existence but legislate for all. They endow the univers with values by their actions. Sartre, in short, proposes a courageous, irrational affiramtion of responsible life and truth aganist meaningless and death.

(618) God as artisan (619) Atheistic existentialism - "If God does not exist, there is at least one being in whom existence preceeds essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept, and that this being is man or, as Heidegger says, essence? It means that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and only afterward, defines himself. Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. But if existence really does procede essence, man is responsible for what he is, he is responsible for all men."

(620) Anguish, Forlornness and Despair

Anguish- Existentialists say that man is anguish What that means is this: the man who involves himself and who realizes that he is not only the person he chooses to be, but also a lawmaker who is, at the same time, choosing all mankind as well as himself, can not help escape the feeling of his total and deep responsibility.

(621) For every man everything happens as if all mankind had its eyes on him and were guiding itself by what he does.

(622) Forlornness - God does not exist, and we have to face all the consequences of this. God/a priori values - The existentialist, on the contrary, thinks it very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him; there can no longer be an a priori Good, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. Nowhere is it written that the Good exists, that we must be honest, that we must not lie because the fact is we are on a plane where there are only men. Dostoevsky said, "If God didn't exist, everything would be possible." That is the very starting point of existentialism. Indeed, everything is permissible if God does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without him does he find anything to cling to. He can't start making excuses for himself. If existence really does not precede essence, there is no explaining things away by reference to a fixed and given human nature. In other words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom. On the other hand, if God does not exist, we find no values or commands to turn to which legitimize our conduct. So, in the bright realm of values, we have no excuse behind us, nor justification before us. We are alone, with no excuses. Man is condemned to be free. Condemned because he did not create himself, yet in other respects is free, because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. The existentialist does not believe in the power of passion. He will never agree that a sweeping passion is a ravaging torrent which fatally leads a man to certain acts and is therefore an excuse. He thinks that man is responsible for his passion. The Existentialist does not think that man is going to help himself by finding in the world some omen by which to orient himself. Because he thinks that man will interpret the omen to suit himself. Because he thinks that man, with no support and no aid, is condemned every moment to invent man.

(625) "I can neither seek for myself for the true condition which will impel me to act, nor apply to a system of ethics.

(620) Forlornness implies that we ourselves choose our being. Forlornness and anguish go together.

(620) Despair

We shall confine ourselves to reckoning only with what depends on our will or the ensemble (collection) of probabilities that make our action possible.

(628) A man is involved in life, leaves his impress on it, and outside of that there is nothing.

(629/630) Action is "quietism" (631) In order to get any truth about myself, I must have contact with another person. The other is indispensable to my own existence, as well as to my knowledge about myself. "Universal essence" is "universal condition"

(632) There is a universality of man, but it is not given (unlike a universal essence), it is perpetually being made. I build the universe in choosing myself.